


avenge our ghosts

by orphan_account



Category: Outlast (Video Games)
Genre: Alcohol Abuse/Alcoholism, Consent Issues, Genital Mutilation, Korean Waylon Park, M/M, POV Second Person, Post-Game(s), Slow Burn, Trauma, Unhealthy Relationships
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2016-06-26
Updated: 2016-06-26
Packaged: 2018-07-18 10:40:24
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence, Rape/Non-Con
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,244
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/7311691
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/orphan_account/pseuds/orphan_account
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p><i>we know him, </i> the Walrider says.</p><p><i>Do we?</i> You’re sure you don’t. </p><p><i>stole your car,</i> the Walrider says, and you jolt. </p><p> <i>What, just now?</i><br/> <br/>The Walrider helpfully reminds you of how you stood smoking and crackling with your new twofold being, stranded like a fucking idiot while some ragged bloody disaster in a patient’s uniform drove your rig off into the night. <i>This is that guy?</i></p>
            </blockquote>





	avenge our ghosts

**Author's Note:**

> I usually don't post WIPs, but I really wanted to put at least some of this piece up. Writing Outlast fanfic helped me out during a rough time last year. 
> 
> Warnings for everything you would expect from Outlast. Slightly AU--Waylon did not escape unharmed from Eddie Gluskin/the Groom.

You’re making another coast-to-coast circuit, because that’s what you do these days, and you’ve washed up for the night in Reno, which is a drab dead-end city plopped in the middle of a dusty desert.

You’ve planted your bony ass on a barstool at one of the many casinos in town, and you’re sucking down beers and watching seniors gamble away their savings.

The shapes of the things (people) that chased you through Mount Massive come back to you more often than you’d like. More often than seems fair, given your cushion of nanomachine metaconsciousness and more often than not quite a lot of alcohol. (When you can persuade the Walrider not to burn the poison out of your system, that is--it thinks that the booze is toxic, since it technically is.) (The thing has kept you from having a single hangover since your death, at least.)

Life post-death is a strange business. You feel saturated these days, when you manage to feel anything that can be described with human language or concepts.

The Walrider senses that Miles-that-was would never have wanted godhood. Miles-that-is doesn’t much want it either, but it’s happening to you whether you like it or not. _A personal communion with our Lord and Savior the Walrider_ , you think, cracking open a Coors.

For all your newfound power, it doesn’t help much with your journalistic ambitions. In fact, keeping the Walrider in check is nearly a full-time job. You want to keep doing what you do—the only thing that harnesses your stubborn streak and mean bastard tendencies to their fullest—but you haven’t been able to do much, because you can’t stay in one place too long and you can’t be near other people safely. Hence the eternal roadtrip of the undead.

 

People-watching has always been a hobby of yours. Casinos are great for that, in a depressing way.

You watch a slight, wary-looking Asian man approach the bar. His eyes cut from side to side under a heavy mop of prematurely greying black hair.

A drunk, middle-aged woman with bouffant hair crashes into him. Her head bobs, on a level with his, as she slides across his chest. Instead of flinching or apologizing, he removes her with a firm, unfriendly hand.

 

Later an equally smashed guy does something similar: he puts his hand on the guy’s shoulder in the middle of a rambling, off-color joke.

The man (by now also tipsy) grabs Too-Friendly Drunk by the wrist and squeezes so hard you can see his knuckles go white from across the room. As he opens his mouth, you borrow a little Walrider energy to listen in.

“Don’t touch me,” the angry guy says. Everything about his manner belies the gentle angle of his jaw, his boyish lack of haircut and his soft, layered shirts. “So help me god, I will cut your hand off if you touch me.”

You slug some pisswater beer, impressed at his totally unjustified venom.

He digs his fingers in for emphasis—tendons stand out on the back of his small, capable hands—and then pushes the handsy guy back.

You’d expect that to start a bar fight, but the angry man’s chilly, serious warning apparently worked. Handsy Drunk wanders off.

 

Then you get up from your barstool with the vague intention of wasting some of your meager cash on the nickel slots, or going for coffee or a burger or something, and you run into the angry man.

Literally. He bumps into you, fends you off with his hands, and says blearily, “My bad.”

This is surprising. You had expected aggression.

“That’s not what you said to that dude earlier,” you say.

“What dude?” he says. He squints up at you, as if bringing you into focus would help with his memory. “Oh. I don’t like people touching me.”

The proximity of this stranger, or possibly something else altogether, wakes up your passenger. The Walrider stretches; its oozy presence licks up your brainstem.

Angry Short Guy starts making small talk; you fake normal as hard as you can, saying “Yeah,” and “Uh-huh,” while the Walrider disrupts your thought processes in bursts of decaying binary. You’ve gotten pretty good at that.

Finally you click back into reality to find that this guy is saying crazy shit and hasn’t noticed anything weird about you.

“I’ve been hearing—” He leans in your direction, and you prepare to catch him if he actually loses his balance. “—I’ve been hearing things all night and I don’t think it’s just because I’ve been drinking.” He frowns. “Hey, what’s your name? I don’t know your name—”

“Miles,” you say with some difficulty. You have a feeling you might be—oozing, or fizzing, or doing something else you’re not supposed to be doing.

“Miles,” the man repeats. A peculiar twist crosses his features, then passes. “Miles, are you a smoker?” He rises up on his toes, balancing himself with two fistfuls of your shirt. He inhales. You see black smoke-but-not-smoke in the corners of your vision.

“Yes,” you lie. He’s smelling the Walrider, that heady black scent like cigarettes and mold and coffee. Burning electrical wiring. Dark smells.

“I don’t mind,” he says, with a tilting dizzy smile. His hands press warmly against your cold, perforated chest. And that’s really peculiar. Most people avoid getting close to you, but this drunk man in this casino bar in Reno can’t seem to stop himself.

You ask the Walrider to sober you up, and it does. Its insubstantial flesh scrapes through yours like a copper wire scrubbing pad, and you feel the ethanol dissolve into its component atoms and dissipate. Gives you the shivers. And now that you’re not so hammered you can both see with your journalist’s eye and hear the Walrider’s messages more clearly.

<we know him.>

 _Do we?_ you think. You’re sure you don’t. You’ve met men who look a little like him before, but you’d certainly recognize his blend of soft sloping features and unsettling gaze. He’d look boyishly sweet, if it weren’t for the hard steel-wire stubble and the dark circles outlining his eyes and the premature lines interrupting the smoothness of his face. 

<stole your car,> the Walrider says, and you jolt. _What, just now?_

The Walrider helpfully reminds you of how you stood smoking and crackling with your new twofold being, stranded like a fucking idiot while some ragged bloody disaster in a patient’s uniform drove your rig off into the night. _This is that guy?_

He’s noticed you’ve tuned out. “Hey,” he says. “Heyyyy. Miles.” In the smoke-fogged haze of this shitty bar you can still see the Walrider moving, curling around him, a darker, more purposeful miasma. His body allows it, is slightly permeable to it.  Your godself brushes him and you feel the electricity that animates his flesh prickle across your own skin.

“Hey,” you say, and your voice goes from casual-friendly to _give me the story_. “You weren’t by any chance in Colorado a couple years back?”

He goes rigid like a cold snap. His lower lip drops to reveal teeth in a sort of horrified threat. “Yes,” he says very quietly, much soberer. “Miles Upshur.” It’s your turn to feel a rush of chill; the electronic clamor of the slot machines outside the bar area recedes.

<told you>

<:P>

A hunch hits you like a brick wall. “You aren’t—”

“I am,” he says all in a rush. “I’m, uh, I’m that guy. the whistleblower from the Murkoff story.”

He looks like he might puke, and you can’t pretend you don’t like it, a little. He ruined your life.

But you also saw how the story developed, and the information in the version that finally got published—an amalgam of what material you managed to send in, and the rest of the film and interviews that the whistleblower provided. You know he’s suffered a lot—a _lot_ —for the sake of bringing this to light. And you still think that’s worth it.

“Never thought I’d meet you,” you say at length.

“I—I thought you were dead. No one seems to know whether you’re alive,” the guy says frankly.

“Well,” you say, grinning, and you can’t stop grinning, it just climbs sideways up your face and goes with a breathy half-laugh. Finally you get it together. “I hardly know if I’m alive.”

“Hah,” he says. Tilts his head. “Same here.” (You know what they did to him. Sort of. You know the vague glancing explanation that he gave of what happened, that they used in the story. But it’s a theoretical.)

He—Waylon Park—is wearing three layers despite the fact that it’s really not that cold yet—October is hotter than it used to be. Soft bleach-spotted t-shirt, waffle-weave henley, plaid flannel button-up. There’s a wedding ring on his finger. You catch a glimpse of his ID as he pulls out a wad of cash to pay for his drinks, and it doesn’t say “Waylon Park.”

As the bartender forks over his change, he asks, "What are you doing around here?”

“Just passing through,” you say. “I travel a lot these days.”

Waylon sighs. “Honestly? This is the first time I’ve been out of my apartment in weeks. I can’t imagine being able to— to leave _town.”_

“I don’t have much choice,” you say. Maybe the Walrider didn’t get all the booze out of your system after all. (You know it did, and it bristles at the suggestion it was anything less than thorough.)

“Well,” he says, “I suppose you’re welcome to crash at my place.” Park isn’t stupid. He clearly understands at least some of the subtext to not having much choice, if not the nanomachine god portion.

“It won’t be a risk for you?”

“I’m,” he tries. Sighs. “I’ve been forced to be separate from my family—”

The Walrider swirls uneasily at the weary pain Waylon’s wearing like perfume. You hold up your hand—can’t get it agitated. “And since you’re the only one at your apartment it doesn’t so much matter if someone’s following me?” you fill in, and he winces.

“Yeah.”

Separation. Waylon doesn’t know the half of it yet, you think grimly, you can show him _separated_ —the Walrider would show it to him by ripping him to bloody shreds, and there is so little separation between you and it these days. You squeeze your cold, pulseless arms to ground yourself. “Well. I’d know something about that.” It is unquestionably a bad idea, but you can’t resist the idea of the only comprehensible companionship you’ve had in two years. “I’ll come to your place.”

 

***

 

Waylon’s apartment smells like he hasn’t left it in two years. Oh, it doesn’t stink exactly, but it’s got a close, stuffy smell to it; the Walrider filters through every separate skin particle turning to dust. Layers and layers of nervous little whistleblower.

The man himself kicks piles of junk out of the way as you walk in. Clothes, a trash bag of clanking cans—“Recycling,” he says apologetically—stacks of papers and notebooks.

“Wanna keep drinking?” he offers. “I have—something around here somewhere—”

“Unhealthy coping mechanisms much?” you say, although to be honest you regret it as soon as your mouth shuts.

Waylon fires back, “You aren’t doing so hot yourself. Drinking your way across America, Miles?”

“You have no idea.” He can’t hurt you with something like that. You sneer. You think your bullet holes might be leaking a little. (The Walrider alternates between wanting you to forget that you host it, and wanting you to maintain exquisite awareness of your corpsehood.)

“Man,” he says, deflating, “that place…” He shakes his head.

“Fuck that place,” you agree.

 

You stay at Waylon's apartment longer than you’d meant to.

Once Waylon sobers up, it becomes very apparent that he is not well. He’s not-well in the way you’d expect a traumatized person separated from all their support systems and not receiving adequate mental health care to be; he’s also not-well in a way which speaks to his time in the Morphogenic Engine more than anything else.

He’s got all his hair; he doesn’t have any scarring visible outside his clothes. But he moves like a Variant. He has twitches, tics. You wonder if he’s on the road to getting cancer. Probably. Sad and beaten and scared as he is, he also has a trace of… what had that poor bastard called it? Unnatural vitality.

You like it—you and the Walrider both like it. The Walrider’s approval hums in your skull hard enough to rattle your teeth, turns your veins to fizzing chains of excitement. And you, what little you isn’t also your parasite—you have no excuse for enjoying it. No explanation. It should disturb you and move you to pity.

 

The apartment’s clutter and stink starts to bother you. You badger Waylon into taking the recycling and trash out. After a certain amount of balking and wincing and “Miles, I can’t”-ing, you give up on talking gently to him and bark, “Help me take this shit out, or I will break your fucking teeth, Park!”

“I can’t,” he says, but he stumbles to pick up the clattering bag of fermenting soda & beer cans. The Walrider briefly emerges from the shelter of your frame and sweeps around him, curious. He flinches—

“Oh, god,” he says. “Oh god.”

You stay quiet, just in case there’s still a chance you can pretend you’re not hosting it. “Someone was listening when I prayed for Blaire to die,” he murmurs ironically as its insubstantial, slippery form phases out.

The Walrider returns to its perch inside you—not that Waylon can see that—coating your insides with slick black, filling you up with a madness and bile and energy that you can’t pretend isn’t yours, amplified and returned to you in a new form. “Yeah,” you force out.

Waylon explains as if there was some way you could have missed it, voice dull: “I just saw something I haven’t seen since—then.”

“I saw it too,” you say, which is not a lie.

“Fuck,” he says. “Fuck staying in, let’s take this trash out.”

 

When you get back to the apartment (minus your heavy, smelly bags), you discover that Park keeps a knife on him now. He checks to be sure it’s still there after he locks the door behind you: its matte black handle settles into his grip easily. The idea of him trying to use it on the Walrider is pretty funny.

 

It might be the next day by now. 4 am. You’re riding just this side of alcohol poisoning (kept from a medical emergency by the Walrider’s diligent efforts) sloshing with booze, facedown on Waylon’s dusty, crumb-filled carpet. You feel saturated with divinity, with $8.99-a-bottle vodka, with twisted and wadded-up emotions.

Waylon is on his back on the couch with his head hanging off the side. His greying hair falls down in a surprisingly silky wave. You wipe some more dark liquid from the corner of your mouth before Waylon can notice you’re dripping ink (or whatever the hell the Walrider brews in your walking corpse).

You bite the bullet.

“So what exactly did they do to you?” You’ve got very little kindness left and a lot of curiosity.

Waylon twitches. His hair sways. He draws his legs up to his body, curling up like an overturned pillbug.

“What do you mean? A lot of people have done a lot of stuff to me.”

“You know. The bit that article leeringly alluded to. The mutilation part, at the hands of the abused kid-turned-serial-killer—”

He whips his body over, protecting his vulnerable underbelly, coming up in a crouch and glaring at you. Clearly he doesn’t like to talk about it. Or be asked about it.

“I mean, you look just fine,” you say, not actually trying to reassure him. It’s simply impossible to tell that anything has happened to his junk.

“Thanks,” he says sourly. He reaches for the bottle. “God. We’re going to have liver failure at this rate.”

 _Not me,_ you do not say. Pressing your face into the dirty carpet, you feel its rough, gritty texture. Hot liquid creeps up your throat and drips out your half-open mouth before you can stop it, a lot like bile but black. You sit up a little and hope Waylon is too drunk to notice that there are stains on his floor.

He's probably not going to tell you. He launches into a story about his college days at Berkeley, something about this brand of vodka, and you let him make things normal.

 

Later on, when it's actually early in the morning, when he's so drunk he can't really stand up, Waylon changes his mind. At first you don't understand why he lifts his layered shirts up, flashing a scarred torso—is he overheating?—but then he says, "That's one thing he did."

You kick your sodden brain into gear; the Walrider perks to attention. Static crackles between your tongue and the roof of your mouth, making you salivate. You listen raptly.

“They fixed part of it,” he says softly, “while I was in the hospital. After I escaped.”

He nods to his now-covered chest. The scarring was ugly and unsubtle, alternating between livid pink and bloodless white, but his chest is flat.

“He… you know. Wanted me to be more womanly, so he just kind of—” Waylon scoops up air and jabs it forward, and you can picture it a little too well. Lift up his skin, fill him out with whatever lumps of flesh you can find, sew it up. Instant titty.

“So. That made kind of a mess, but it wasn’t anything the doctors couldn’t fix.” He does not look like he enjoys the memory; you bet he was excruciatingly uncomfortable with the institutional setting, after Mount Massive.

“The rest wasn’t so easy,” you guess.

He sighs. “You can—can subtract easy—You can take away what’s there, but adding back on…”

“How much did he cut?” you say bluntly.

He shrinks away, curling in on himself, face hidden. “I—Take a wild fucking guess, Miles.”

“Everything?” You aren't sure whether your gut twists in horror or in anticipation.

Waylon barks a laugh that makes the hair stand up on the back of your neck: pure asylum-bred madness.

“Jesus,” you comment. The Walrider suggests <me.>

“You know, maybe I should show you,” he says savagely, turning on you. 

His eyes gleam in the weak, grey dawn light like a Variant’s would in your camera night vision. _Ain’t that a trip,_ you think inanely.

Slurring, stumbling over his words, he goes on. “Maybe I should show you exactly what he did. They told me it was a miracle I survived the blood loss long enough to make it out of the building—”

Waylon uncurls and leans into your face. “He didn’t just cut everything off; he shoved a circular saw between my legs and then did a little sculpting on the leftovers.”

Bile bubbles in your throat. The Walrider thrashes and churns within the walls of your corpse.

“So I’ve got scars like nothing you’ve ever seen.” Actually, you have seen scars like that while you were in Mount Massive, but you doubt he wants to hear that. You say nothing.

 

The next morning, he's sour and hungover. You don't know if he remembers what he said at all.


End file.
